Lindsay Botten, director of the ANU's National Computational Infrastructure centre where the computer is housed, said the machine can handle complex simulations and modelling much faster and at a higher resolution than previously available in Australia.

Predicting extreme weather, which Australia frequently experiences, required millions of lines of code and complex information to be processed in an instant, said Andy Pitman from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

The machine, estimated to be the 27th most powerful computer in the world, weighs 70 tonnes and has 57,000 processing cores (the equal of about 15,000 laptop computers) and 160 terabytes of memory (the equivalent of about 30,000 laptops).